Bob Herbert is underappreciated.
If you’re not a New York Times junkie like me, you probably don’t know who he is — he’s one of the paper’s seven or eight op-ed columnists. Others — Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Paul Krugman — they’ve got buzz. Bob Herbert? More of a buzzkill. He writes largely about the (primarily black) disenfranchised among us — those in the inner cities, those who are poor, those without health insurance.
T.A. Franks in the Washington Monthly asks: Why is Bob Herbert boring?
His underlying problem turns out to be simple: he doesn’t write with his audience in mind…. If he’d overcome his indifference to “chatter” and elite opinion and instead try to attract and coopt it—in other words, think about who his audience is and what he wants it to do—he could be one of the most powerful liberal voices in the country.
Herbert’s writing isn’t usually flashy or sexy or witty, but he almost always makes great points. It’s too bad more people don’t read him.
The KC paper occasionally prints Bob Herbert’s columns. Although I read them, I generally find his writing to be pretty dull. I recommend Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald for his excellent writing on minority (African-American) affairs, as well as other topics of general interest. He’s also written some great columns on GLBT issues.